Chetzemoka

@Chetzemoka@startrek.website
1 Post – 494 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Critical care nurse here. The answer is esophageal varices.

It's the same physiological anomaly as hemorrhoids, except in your esophagus. Swollen, fragile veins caused by increased internal pressure. In the case of hemorrhoids, that pressure inside the veins is caused by straining too much when trying to poo. In esophageal varices, the increased pressure inside the esophageal veins comes from blood backing up from a swollen, scarred, and damaged liver. So we often see esophageal varices in end stage alcohol use disorder.

Horror stories abound in emergency departments and ICUs of having to do CPR on a patient massively hemorrhaging out of their mouth from esophageal varices. As soon as nurses I know saw this report, our immediate thought was, "Yep, varices."

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/15429-esophageal-varices

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I could actually cry right now, what a fucking relief

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My grandmother with Alzheimer's passed those clinical tests long after she had already asked us to take away her keys because she knew she wasn't safe to drive anymore. So yeah...

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LITERAL blasphemy. Like actual, textbook blasphemy. And his sycophants lap it up.

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From a person with a lot of years of experience fighting mold on wood in a humid climate, what you want is borax:

https://www.thisoldhouse.com/green-home/21331232/killing-mold-on-wood

Borax kills mold and also soaks into wood and stays there to prevent future growth. Bleach does not help on porous surfaces like wood:

"Note that bleach should not be used to kill mold found on wood. While bleach is very effective for killing mold on non-porous surfaces, it doesn’t work well when it comes to wood. This is because the chlorine in bleach can’t penetrate wood, so only the water portion of the bleach gets absorbed.

The mold may appear to be removed from the surface, but it’ll likely continue to grow underneath and return within a few months."

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I hate that we lost sight of what wealth really is and replaced it with the idea of profit. I bought my house to provide myself with financial security, not profit.

My monthly "rent" (mortgage payment) is locked in for the next 25 years and will not go up. At the end of those 25 years when I'm ready to retire, I'll have housing with only taxes and insurance payments. THAT is wealth. THAT is what home ownership is meant to be. If housing prices fall, it won't change my life a bit.

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Hmm...I wonder why it happened so late? I'm sure it couldn't be that they were completely restricted from being able to access those services earlier in the pregnancy when it would have been better, easier, and safer. I'm sure they just overlooked those conveniently available, necessary medical abortion services that are so easy to find in Oklahoma.

Wait...

There are a few things I wish we could really show the public. The first is how brutally savage and undignified CPR really is. And the second is what alcohol abuse really does to a person.

Chronic malnutrition, brain damage, hallucinations, anxiety, internal bleeding, fluid swelling your abdomen like a water balloon, literal ammonia building up in your blood that we treat by deliberately inducing massive diarrhea. That's not even mentioning esophageal varices and the increased cancer risk.

Alcohol is a horrifying drug.

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History lesson time: This wasn't done on purpose. It's an artifact of decisions made by Congress during World War II to support war production.

So many young men were away at war that it created a labor shortage, even with some women entering the work force. This led to spiraling increases in wages that were threatening the viability of critical war manufacturers.

In an effort to protect this manufacturing sector, Congress capped wage increases. But those corporations were still competing for workers and now they were no longer able to offer them higher and higher wages. So instead, they started offering them "perks" like health insurance, pensions, and paid time off.

THEN:

"In 1943 the War Labor Board, which had one year earlier introduced wage and price controls, ruled that contributions to insurance and pension funds did not count as wages. In a war economy with labor shortages, employer contributions for employee health benefits became a means of maneuvering around wage controls."

Emphasis mine. And guess what? When those young men returned from war and re-entered the work force, they wanted those perks too. So which company was going to be the first to deescalate the arms race and NOT offer health insurance?

And those perks being so ubiquitous meant the government never had an incentive to provide health coverage directly to anyone of working age, so we only have Medicare for retirees.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/#:~:text=In%201943%20the%20War%20Labor,of%20maneuvering%20around%20wage%20controls.

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"he vetoed this bill because the fund the state uses to pay unemployment benefits will be nearly $20 billion in debt by the end of the year.

The fund the state uses to pay unemployment benefits is already more than $18 billion in debt. That’s because the fund ran out of money and had to borrow from the federal government during the pandemic, when Newsom ordered most businesses to close and caused a massive spike in unemployment. The fund was also beset by massive amounts of fraud that cost the state billions of dollars."

The reasoning and background, if anyone is curious

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These people are so fucking selfish. You were hired as a public servant, you should serve the people who elected you

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The rail strike would have had major economy-wide side effects, including people in other industries being laid off and inflation being exacerbated by shortages in basic food, water, gas.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/looming-rail-strike-would-take-a-major-toll-on-u-s-economy

After averting the strike, the Biden administration continued to pressure and negotiate with rail companies to get the paid sick days that were the sticking point. But there's been almost no news coverage about that fact.

"Negotiations with the other labor coalition unions continued toward a Sept. 15 deadline, but when it became obvious that the bargaining parties would not reach consensus by then, Biden asked then-Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh to assemble the sides and reach an acceptable agreement that would head off a national freight rail strike.

On deadline day, the parties reached an agreement on an updated contract that included the biggest wage increases in 47 years. Over the next several weeks, while acknowledging that the agreement was less than perfect, the IBEW and several of its fellow coalition unions voted to ratify the agreement. A handful of others, however, did not, instead threatening a December freight rail strike.

Biden, citing the potential economic impact of a national freight rail strike during the winter holidays, on Nov. 28 called on Congress to impose the emergency board’s agreement.

Since then, several other railroad-related unions have also seen success in negotiating for similar sick-day benefits. These 12 unions represent more than 105,000 railroad workers. (emphasis mine)

“Biden deserves a lot of the credit for achieving this goal for us,” Russo said. “He and his team continued to work behind the scenes to get all of rail labor a fair agreement for paid sick leave.”

https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid

A much, much larger question is this: If that rail infrastructure is THIS critical to the basic functioning of our economy, why are we allowing it to be held hostage by private for-profit corporations? This shit should be nationalized and those should be government jobs.

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Targeting a private citizen who was involved in bribing members of the Supreme Court of the United States. Somehow I think that second part might be relevant to Congress subpoenaing that "poor wittle pwivate citizen"

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This is exactly why the billionaires are dismantling the current social media platforms. Organizing is the only threat they truly fear.

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This headline is some absolute bullshit.

California already had health insurance for undocumented immigrants, as does Massachusetts. It's just limited to emergency care and pregnancy care.

California is expanding their existing coverage to comprehensive health care including primary care, which is cheaper than letting medical conditions get so completely out of control that they require expensive and disabling emergency hospitalizations.

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No she was one of several women imprisoned under a new Alabama statute for "chemical endangerment of a fetus." You know, a "crime" that already can't be committed again by the time the imprisoned reach trial for it because of the way our "justice" system works.

Those women aren't allowed to endanger a fetus, but the all-knowing authorities are, apparently. (Yes, let's forcibly cold-turkey detox a pregnant person who was using. Great idea.)

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Injecting medications into necks.

Medical things are rarely accurate, but Jesus this one is absolutely infuriating. There's no anatomy in a neck that you could even inject anything INTO. You're not aiming for a jugular vein on the fly and there's not enough tissue in a neck to receive an intramuscular or subcutaneous injection. If your needle is too long, you're definitely hitting something critical. It's feasible that you could squirt medication into someone's trachea or esophagus or - god forbid - spine if you actually tried this nonsense.

Arms, people, ARMS. This is where we inject things into people who are not interested in receiving an injection. Arms or butts, right through the clothes. You're aiming for the deltoid muscle or the glutes. I'm even willing to concede the inaccuracy of a medication affecting someone instantly (they don't), if Hollywood would just stop having characters inject things into people's necks.

On our next episode of medical things that make me crazy: People getting shot through the shoulder with zero consequences.

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And then the movie patient pops up and smiles and everything is perfectly restored back to normal instead of, "Oh, we convinced your heart to start beating again, but you're still unconscious probably because you have brain damage, your kidneys are dying, your blood is acidic, and now we're gonna put you on a breathing machine. Best wishes!"

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Fascists deliberately create chaos so they can try to sell you the idea that they're the only ones who can end the chaos.

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I miss having a mask on all day at work because now I have to make an effort to hide my sarcastic faces again

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Tl;dr - a large percentage of the list are birds from Hawaii that clearly didn't survive the introduction of cats. And several more are fresh water mussels probably lost to the zebra mussel invasion.

Millions of peaches! Peaches for me. Millions of peaches! Peaches for free.

LOOKOUT!

I don't mow my lawn.

Fully invested in the no lawn movement, I've been slowly replacing my grass with "no-mow" fine fescue grasses that fall over when they grow long instead of standing up straight. They grow slowly and are meant to not be mowed most of the summer season, just a couple times in the spring and cut down low in the fall.

Between that and using shredded leaves as mulch in my flower beds or lasagna mulching to create a new flower bed, my neighbors definitely think I'm a bit off.

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Just did. Won our vote Wednesday night 💪

In real life, a restaurant can and will kick you out and ban you from the premises for wearing a swastika and saying you think minorities don't deserve to live.

Ergo, being kicked off a company's privately owned server for hate speech is EXACTLY the same amount of freedom they would have in real life.

Everyone loves censorship. Even you.

The most effective medication is the one that actually gets used.

Literal ignorance. There are already studies.

"GnRHa treatment did not seem to have a particularly adverse effect on reproductive function or bone growth."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4342775/

Puberty blockers only with social transition until age 18 are the standard of care given to the trans girl I grew up with 30 years ago. She didn't start exogenous hormones or surgery until she was a legal adult. None of this is new and the people you're listening to are literally just making things up.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2798007

I mean, we're fast approaching the 3rd anniversary of my first Covid vaccine dose, and I'm still waiting to drop dead the way they promised.

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I'm a nurse, not a doctor, just gonna chime in here that non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is a thing:

https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/04/14/fatty-liver-disease-not-caused-by-alcohol-is-common-and-often-missed

In general, any kind of sudden changes to your normal functioning are things you should probably be discussing with a physician, even if you're young and otherwise healthy. The really encouraging news is that, if this is indeed caused by a health problem, you're young enough that it's really likely you can completely reverse it and get back to 100%. And if it's not, then no harm done by seeing a doctor and confirming that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(Also, not to scare you, but no I wouldn't expect to see that dramatic a decrease in alcohol tolerance over the course of just a couple of years at your age. I think it's worth talking to a doctor about this.)

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United HealthCare

Oh wait, you CAN'T boycott them. The ultimate monopoly.

What about this woman?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar

Fuck all the way off, asshole.

If you worked in healthcare, there was a pretty clear delineation. We got vaccines and people stopped fucking dying so much.

I opened 2021 to one of our chronic dialysis patients getting admitted for Covid, so severely short of breath they needed to go to the critical care stepdown unit, and I thought "this is it " By the time I was able to arrive at the hospital to run their dialysis, this person was already off oxygen and up walking around their room.

Come to find out, they had been vaccinated. I'm told that was one of the first people in the State of Massachusetts who got Covid after being vaccinated, and the difference in severity was so dramatic I'll never forget it.

That and movie theaters reopening are the only reasons I remember 2021. It was just a lot less scary even though I was still working like crazy.

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This is the exact problem with these bans. The medical procedure in question (dilation and curretage) can be and is used in cases with a fetus in any condition. The same procedure can be used for an elective abortion, a medically necessary abortion, or even to complete a miscarriage that is already underway.

The "abortion" procedure would have saved Savita Halapanavar's life. I personally know three women who were in similar circumstances, losing a lot of blood during miscarriages that weren't completing on their own.

You can't ban medical procedures that have valid use cases. These things are most properly regulated by medical professionals themselves.

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This is incorrect. Here's the data:

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/

I know it's counterintuitive, but preventing access to easily lethal means of suicide decreases the number of deaths by suicide, and there's a lot of data confirming this. Suicidal crises are spontaneous and temporary MOST of the time, and 90% of people who attempt suicide do not go on to die by suicide by some other means in the future after they are rescued.

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"Means Matter"

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/

Reducing access to more lethal means of suicide reduces deaths by suicide in a population. The data on this is unequivocal.

That's because the majority of suicidal crises are spontaneous and of absurdly short duration, on the order of around 20 minutes. If you interrupt the process between decision and action, people survive. And 90% of people who survive a suicide attempt never go on to die by suicide at any future point in their lives.

Christ, he's so young to die of a treatable cancer.

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Dear Google, stop trying to make YT Music happen. It's not going to happen.

Just downloaded AntennaPod

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It's not. It's a disingenuous way to enact early abortion bans that targets people's emotions, but is meaningless from a healthcare perspective. We don't treat heartbeat as the ultimate arbiter of "life" in fully grown adults; we use brain function.

If we want to apply a similar standard for determining the cutoff for elective abortions, it's more complicated because the fetal brain assembles itself slowly. Hearing starts to become intact some time in the late second trimester, but the capacity to experience pain doesn't develop until after viability (the point in development when a fetus can be sustained medically outside the womb.)

https://www.acog.org/advocacy/facts-are-important/gestational-development-capacity-for-pain

Even using those potential physiological markers can't be relied on to enact a full permanent ban without exceptions because a fetus can develop defects that are incompatible with life, such as severe hydrocephalus or anencephaly, which complicate the process of gestation and birth in such a way that a late term abortion may be medically appropriate considering the fetus will not develop the ability to live independently outside the womb anyway.

And the real kicker here: Doctors are already very good at making these kinds of nuanced distinctions and making decisions in consultation with their pregnant patients and their families. We do not need legal regulation to do what medical ethics regulations already do very well.

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Why do you care what racist uncle thinks though? Is it going to affect anyone in the world other than him?

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No, I think this goes to show that the whole idea that people will cry if prices are raised to increase wages is a lie. People who buy products and services want the people who are tasked with delivering those products and services to make a good living. They are willing to pay more in the form of tips; they will be willing to pay more in the form of prices. Just give people raises already ffs.

(And that's not to say that prices will actually increase all that much if wages increase because that's also mostly a lie told to protect corporate profit margins.)

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